Book Review: Alternative Medicine by Rafael Campo, Duke University Press: Durham, 2014

Abstract

After reading through Alternative Medicine a second time, petalling the pages with scribbled on post-it notes, I walked through my own hospital, hoping Campo’s ability to see that which is all around us with a simultaneously laser-like and prismatic poet’s eye, would osmotically enhance not only my sensibilities but also my ability to translate those perceptions into words. Alas, after several prosaic encounters with people seeking directions through the hospital complex, I wound up in the California sun sitting in the memorial rose garden with nary a fresh thought about the sweet scent of the abundant first blooms of spring. My admiration and envy of Campo’s talent thus mounted and leapfrogged to dizzying heights. There is a tribe of physicians with extensive medical careers who also lay claim to a full life in the literary arts. Anton Chekhov, William Carlos Williams, Irving Yalom, Dannie Abse and Perri Klass (who holds dual professorships in journalism and pediatrics) aremembers. Sterling poets such as John Stone also belong to this club though some might say it is difficult to extricate his best writing from his impressive medical career. Various physician-writers do not sustain decades of work inmedicine; examples areMikhail Bulgakov and Sir Arthur ConanDoyle, both of whom quit medicine at about age thirty, give or take. Where any given physician-author lies on the spectrum and why woefully few women are included in many of the listings of this tribe are questions for debate. But from my perspective, Campo successfully engages with and navigates through both worlds:medicine and creativewriting. Campo,who teaches poetry in nonmedical settings including the MFA program at Lesley College, has held artist residencies at universities such as Stanford, attracting as much attention from the arts and humanities academy as from the medical enclave. Alternative Medicine is Campo’s sixth collection of poetry and his eighth book (he is an essayist as well). Each of its three sections is named for a poem: “Havana,” “Alternative Medicine” and “Plonk.” The book builds on Campo’s themes of love, his Hispanic and, in particular, Cuban heritage, doctoring, HIV, the socially marginalized, familial ties, poetry/ poetics and gay life. Although he concentrates some themes—for example, the middle section largely coalesces around medically related poems—others, like life’s weavings, web themselves across poems and sections. I focus on a few delights from each section. J Med Humanit (2014) 35:451–453 DOI 10.1007/s10912-014-9292-6